To blog, or not to blog?

I started thinking about this a few days ago, when I was messing around with the CSS of this site to make my Google Reader shares display nicely.  Well, I started thinking about it again, I guess.  I've thought about this many times.  Why don't I write on this site anymore?  This used to be such an important thing in my life, and now I have to force myself to even think about it most of the time.

One of the main reasons I don't write much anymore is that I'm afraid of what people who read it will think.  Not the random strangers, obviously, but the people who know me and read this, only some of whom I know about.  So it's become the most boring kind of blog...the kind that's updated infrequently with pictures from vacations, or sanitized updates about my personal life, scrubbed of names and salacious details.  And the knowledge that it's become so banal only paralyzes me further.  It's increasingly uninteresting because it's increasingly uninteresting.

That's not what I wanted this to be when I made it.  Well, I guess originally I just made this site so that I'd have a place to pretend I had a band and put the music that resulted from that fantasy.  But it evolved pretty immediately into a place that I regularly recorded actual thoughts.  It inspired me to learn some basic web programming.  Hell, it inspired me to create another site at which I could post more thematically specific things (I all-but-ignore that one too, now, but that's because I don't listen to enough cool music anymore).  This site used to bring me joy because it was a public (but still relatively private because honestly, who spends the time to read this stuff?) place to vent*.

When I go back and read some of that venting though, I'm embarrassed.  That's another thing that keeps me from posting more often.  An accumulated shame.  The fear that the next post might be one more than I'll read later and think was stupid.  And the knowledge that, as dumb as it is and as unlikely as it may be that anyone would stumble upon it years from now in a Google cache, I'm crafting an indelible persona for myself on the web that feels incrementally unlike my current self, despite sharing my name.  It's petrifying.  It's not like I don't have thoughts I'd like to post somewhere all the freaking time.  I just don't know that I want to post them here anymore.  I feel exposed.

This is unorganized rambling and it's a testament to my haziness today that I'm going to post it all, especially since there's no A-Ha! moment at the end where I decide to screw everyone and post every day about impolite things like love and politics.  I'm probably still not going to post any more often.  I've just been thinking a lot about it, is all.

Anyone else who does this sort of thing ever become similarly preoccupied?


*This post, by the way, is only meta-venting.

Nerdgasm.

I realize that the Cognoscenti of the web will scoff at my years-late acclaim, but I don't care. I've been using it forever, but recently Google Reader has become, without question, the most important webthing to me besides email. It's completely made redundant my Digg and del.icio.us accounts, become far more important than Facebook, and solidified my resistance to Twitter (which I still think is dumb). As the sharing features have become more and more robust, it has become a complete maelstrom of things I like but wouldn't have known about if not for my friends. It's a machine that gives me food pellets every time I press the button, and at the same time an echo chamber for all the things I find that I like, from awesome things to reasons-to-hate-the-GOP. And now, with a little javascript, I've added a constantly updated stream of my most recent shares to the sidebar of this very webpage, to make it easy to ignore not only the things that I take the time to type up myself, but also the things that I just plain agree with or think are funny. This is very exciting.

If you're super cool, you're already reading this blog with your Google Reader, in which case, I'm always looking for more sharebros. If you're not already using it, get on board son. This train is bound for glory.

trainshow

Not a super-ton to say here...but I figured it's best to push any entry down the page a bit that declares how "remarkably shitty" I've been.  God, it's so embarrassing to read the things I write on here when I'm in a bad mood.  I don't know what prevents me from just deleting all that stuff, other than a misguided desire to preserve...something.  Anyway, I'm much better now. Promise.  As proof, check out all these pictures I took at the Holiday Train Show at the NYBG.

Wonderful to remember once in a while that local tourism and awesomeness are not mutually exclusive.

false starts

How've you been? I've been remarkably shitty lately. I've sat down to write a lot lately on here, but I've always chickened out before posting and cleared everything I had written. I'll have a lot to say on what I'll look back on as my Scumbag Period eventually, and I'll post it here when the time is right because that's what I do, but for now I just don't have it in me. Suffice to say for now that I've been less than the man I aspire to be, and I'm paying for it.

Apropos of nothing, I've been poring over some other false starts (dating back just a bit more than 2 years) and while I can't really remember why I abandoned some of these (others are more obvious) I'm compelled today to put these out there and delete them from draft, just for the heck of it. Also, someone told me I could make breaks now in Blogger, so I figured this was a fun way to try that. A bunch of stuff you won't care about, below the break! [EDIT: that shit isn't going to work for me unless I really retool this template, which is ghastly old.  I'm not doing that today, or anytime soon.]

Am I just reading this wrong?

There was a time when my Google Reader shares were a mostly jocular affair; links to particularly funny blog posts, particularly insightful takedowns of people who think Twitter is important, or particularly lol lolcats. To the dismay of the 6 people in the entire world who give a shit though, it's lately become an echo chamber of links to Daily Kos and HuffPo stories re: health care. Stories about rescission, links to videos of a Republican Congressman laughing about people losing their insurance not because they can't afford it, but because they're losing their jobs! Get it!? Hilarious! Really though, it's depressing stuff and if you're my sharebro and you're also reading this, I'm sorry.

Today I was inspired to post about it on here because I got this letter in the mail (you're gonna have to click to enlarge it if you want to be able to read it):


I've gotten a lot of these lately because I went to 8 sessions with a physical therapist to try (unsuccessfully) to fix my back a bit. They're indecipherable, at least insofar as figuring out what particular charges were for, and they're always slightly different. I don't know what procedure code 97012 is, but I have to assume that's how much my therapist charges for...maybe holding my legs down while I do back extensions hanging off a table? Or telling me to ride a stationary bike for 6 minutes? 97110 was a bit pricier, so maybe that was for strapping me into the traction machine.

What's more, it seems like my flat $45 copay for any specialist visits (PT counts as a specialist) covered all but...$2.58 of my treatment on 8/26? The postage to send out the statement cost a double-digit percentage of the cost of the treatment. Golly, it's no wonder I have to pay about $400 a month for the privilege of being a HealthNet customer.

And it's even more wonderful that, given the cost, they saw it in their infinite wisdom appropriate to tell me initially I could only have 5 sessions, and that if I wanted more my therapist would have to write some reports about why I needed more. Which she did, and I was graciously granted a few more sessions before I decided to throw in the towel on the whole thing (partly because I'd already spent $360 on copays for minimal results).

Does any of this make any sense at all, ever? Who are these people who are so happy with the way health care works right now that they'll scream themselves hoarse in defense of these companies?

another year older and...

...I'm giving yoga a shot. Tonight was my second run through Yoga For Beginners, and my first one without an asterisk, as I managed not only not to take any breaks (though my legs shook like leaves), but to remain fully conscious the entire ordeal. The first time, not so much. I've never fainted before in my life, so although I didn't actually lose consciousness, the blurry, almost pixelated vision, cold sweat, and buckling knees were...awful. Especially the second time in the same session, when you'd think I'd have learned my lesson about actually continuing to breathe. Right, so the first time was bad. This time though, wow. I'll be producing my own DVDs in no time.

Just like anything else I try to start doing*, finding the time is going to be the real battle. I was motivated to get to it tonight because nothing lights a fire under my ass like abysmal failure, but it's going to be hard to keep myself as motivated when I begin to commit the disc's routine to memory. I am already beginning to understand how people amass large collections of yoga DVDs.

...

I turned 28 yesterday. I don't have much to say about it, but that's why the title of this post is what it is.


*Like this blog! Or the music that was the original reason I made this site! Or...

I never do this anymore.

So, I went to London and Dublin last month, and for days and days after the trip, I found myself dreaming up pithy witticisms and observations to put up here chronicling my journey. And, well, it's been a few weeks now and I don't remember most of them. I can tell you that while I was half joking to myself when I planned to say something like "I never want to eat mayonnaise again as long as I live," that particular aversion has not subsided. It might even have grown, in fact. Not unlike my belly after so much mayonnaise.

I took a bunch of pictures on the trip of London (mostly of buildings), Dublin (again, a lot of buildings), and the U2 concert that brought us there in the first place (mostly of aging rock gods). Check them out if you want. Also, I wrote a lot more about the concert at wealsoran.com, where my writings about concerts and the like tend to end up.

Anyway, after the trip to Europe, which was fun but incredibly stressful, I'm just returning from a different kind of trip. I spent last week couch surfing in Los Angeles, and doing very little other than enjoying good friends, good food, and good drink. Oh, and we fired shotguns.

With these two trips under my belt (the build-up-steam and the blow-off-steam), I'm about to take a few very deep breaths, and go under water for 2 months as SAT season revs up again. I'm as ready as I'll ever be, I suppose.

This hasn't been fun

It's been a hell of a month. I made light of it in a post before, but I've spent pretty much every day between that post and this one in the grips of a hypochondria that I've otherwise mostly held at bay since childhood. I've been to the doctor at least once every week, and had an x-ray, a nerve conduction test, and an MRI. I've been prescribed everything from special shampoo to muscle relaxants to antibiotics. I'm fairly sure that I actually succeeded in worrying myself sick last week. What I have to show for all that now is a doctor's recommendation that I try physical therapy to get my back (which I've abused for years with poor posture) right, and hopefully alleviate the issues in my legs.

Now that I have some sort of diagnosis, I can feel myself starting to come out of it, but it's far from over. I still wake up in a mild panic once in a while, my mind racing to the disturbing facts I learned and cannot unlearn before I forbade myself from visiting WebMD (by actually blocking the domain on my router). My heart rate still routinely jumps up over 100 beats per minute whenever I think about checking my heart rate. My hands still shake a bit when I take time to see if my hands are shaking. I'm less of a wreck than I've been, but still a bit wreckish.

I don't especially like posting about this stuff. But I've had to come to terms with the fact over the last month or so that I'm so susceptible to this kind of thing that it can completely lay me out, so I guess I'd better start dealing with it. So this is...that. I guess. A record of me being convinced this afternoon that I'm okay, despite not always feeling that way.

It's also a way for me to send a little anonymous support back out into the Internet, which provided not only the ammo for me to start feeling this way, but also (when I learned to look in the right places) a fair amount of comfort in the knowledge that lots of people freak out like this.

So, yeah. I completely lost it for most of June. But I'm back now. I think. Who needs a drink?

Next on the list of things I'm going to have to swear off of to keep myself sane: watching Mets games.

2 things

1. Awesomely, I discovered today that even though maple and brown sugar Quaker Instant Oatmeal is best before a certain date, it remains quite serviceable and, dare I say, satisfying for at least 8 months afterwards.
2. Usually it takes me months, if not years, to look back and be slightly embarrassed by things I've written on this site, but today I am already a bit ashamed of this line from yesterday: "I'm 27. Time to get regular with this shit." Ugh.

I have that. That too. Oh, and definitely that.

So I'm sitting in Amy's room at the same conference-center-that-used-to-be-a-monastery that from which I wrote around this time last year while she works, and after about 45 minutes of Googling my bodily idiosyncrasies to see which horrible diseases I might have (answer: all of them) I decided that maybe my time would be better spent forcing myself to write, to get back into the habit of doing so more than once a month.

I've been listening to this book on my iPod that I downloaded a long time ago and ignored forever called The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, and every time I listen to it for an hour or so, I tell myself that I should stop. It's quite directly responsible for this morning's WebMD-fest, for one thing. It's penetrated straight to the core of my long-suppressed hypochondriasis. An Amazon review:

"After you turn 7, your risk of dying doubles every eight years." By your 80s, you "no longer even have a distinctive odor ... You're vanishing." "The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3-year-old." And it goes on and on. David Shields's litany of decay and decrepitude might have overwhelmed the age-sensitive reader (like this one), but The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead manages to transcend the maudlin by melding personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life.

So, yeah. It's tailor-made to give me nightmares, but it's also touching, funny sometimes, and in the end, as my first ever philosophy professor might have said, it's life-affirming, not life-negating. And it's inspired me to call a doctor next week and get myself checked out for the first time in years. Hell, maybe even a dentist too, even though I just saw one and had half my face drilled out 6 months ago. I'm 27. Time to get regular with this shit.

In news much more inline with making me feel alive, I went to a batting cage with a friend from work the other day, and was pleased to find that I can still hit the ball. And develop mean-ass blisters.